Bestiary Breakdown

A blog for talking about monsters and how they can be used in your games.

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Janni

Want to introduce players to genies who aren’t the all-powerful wish granters commonly seen post-Disney? The janni’s for you.

Besides some spell-like abilities, including thrice a day invisibility and plane shift, janni have two special abilities. Change Size (Sp) lets them shrink or grow a target, an ability which can function on themselves. The other is defensive, relfectign their origin as a mixture of all four elemental energies. Elemental Endurance (Ex) lets them survive on any elemental plane for 48 hours as if they were native to that plane, though time they spend their over that limit slowly damages them.

Janni are not bound to any elemental plane, formed equally from their energies and native to the material plane. Despite this, they are still genies and you would be best not to forget that. They take insult easily, but they also have a strict sense of honor and hospitality. 

Interestingly, they're actually the closest to the original genie. In the old stories, the genies didn’t have any special magical powers when granting wishes. If you wished for money, they gave it to you from their own fortunes. If you wished for a castle they’d build it themselves, though more powerful genies could do it faster. It wouldn’t be impossible for a janni to offer a wish to adventurers in exchange for a favor, only to surprise them by actually  putting in the work to see it through rather than simply snapping their fingers and having it done.

A janni runs a business at a planar crossroads, offering shelter to beings of all stripes. Daemons, ghouls, adventurers, angels, dimensional shamblers, and more all brush shoulders under its roof, barely kept in check by the strict code of tenancy. Those who break the rules by acting against another occupant or abuse hospitality are quickly evicted as the elemental servants turn on them.

A janni owed a favor and has been ordered to construct a castle. However, progress has been slow and parts of his construction seem to fail, forcing him to regularly restart entire sections. He has become infuriated at this, suspecting sabotage and harboring fears that he was never meant to finish the castle at all. He’ll commission anyone passing by to investigate the matter for him, though he’s careful only to promise vast riches as a reward after how this favor is turning out.

Two janni are in a competition to see who is better. They approach unwitting mortals and ask them to make a wish, then each janni does their best to fulfil it and asks the mortal to judge who did it better. The safest option is to say both did equally well in order to avoid angering one of the volatile outsiders, but this merely delays the problem as they seek out a new judge for their contest.

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Irnakurse

A tree of screaming meat. Yeah, that’s as good a way as any to sum up the irnakurse.

Irnakurse have two special abilities, both related to their horrendous existence. Mind Lash (Su) forces anyone they strike to view flashes of the irnakurse’s own ruined life and twisted emotions. Soul Scream (Su), on the other hand, hits everyone around it as it channels all of its pain, rage, terror, and disgust into a shriek that lasts far too long.

Fun fact, “Irnakurse” means “perfect one” in Elven. Un-fun fact, irnakurse are elves, or at least they were. They’re the end product of dropping an elf in a fleshwarp vat and remaking them into an tree-like abomination that horrifies others almost as much as it horrifies themselves. There’s something symbolic about how elves value their beauty and become such abominations, as well as the fact that even in this twisted state they’re close to their beloved nature.

Elven tradition sees each of their kind buried with a bundle of seeds held to their breast. The cluster grows and fuses, becoming a hybrid of the various plants and creating a forest of beautiful, unique trees for a graveyard. But on some occasions an evil elf’s soul lingers, not strong enough to form an undead creature but potent enough to taint the tree and create a monster of flesh and bark.

A particular elven family was blighted by a curse from their rivals, causing their members to occasionally mutate into irnakurse seemingly without cause. Horrible as they are, the aberrant things still hold the authority they normally would and are treated as such, wheeled around in artfully designed pots by servants to balls and political meetings. Visitors may find it strange that the other elves seem to pay no mind to the gibbering, shrieking things as they insinuate themselves just like any elf, but they may also find the trigger that causes the transformation.

A red dragon rules a nation and brooks no rebellion or disobedience. For those who attempt to defy his will, he sets aside a place for them in his garden, where rows of planted irnakurse compete for space with torture implements where decorations would go and petrified statues still hold the conscious minds of their former lives.

Image and stats from Paizo’s Bestiary 4, page 105.

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Interlocutor

What do you get when you cross a cenobite with a dreadnought? You get an interlocutor, a kyton that’s carved away most of its body and replaced it with a twisted mass of shadow-infused metal.

In combat, an interlocutor's Surgical Strikes (Ex) let it expand its critical range and inflict bleed damage as it targets vital regions, while its Unnerving Gaze (Su) staggers targets as they recognize their own mangled body amid the machinery of its form. But these are not its most feared weapons. No, that role goes to its spell-like abilities. While it has spells to be expected of a kyton like bleed and of an outsider like plane shift, the majority of its spells are healing spells. At-will stabilize, thrice a day cure serious wounds and restoration, and a once a day breath of life allow it to heal significant damage.

Interlocutors are described as surgeon-sculptors, to whom all flesh is a canvas. Their bladed limbs and medical knowledge make it clear they know how to take someone apart, but their healing spells are far more horrifying. Ordinarily you could try to find comfort in the fact that there are some things that can’t be surpassed simply because they remove too much, but an interlocutor can completely heal its victims and even bring them back from the dead. To fall under the ministrations of an interlocutor is to know that they can carve you down to the bone, then do it all again tomorrow.

Not all interlocutors become as such through inspiration. Ivrask the Flayed is one such kyton, creating her metal body after an angelic attack left her too mangled to survive otherwise. The other interlocutors of the monastery despise her for her promotion to their status without achieving the knowledge and wisdom of self-perfection necessary to willingly shed portions of their body, plotting to allow an incursion by mortal crusaders conveniently arranged to see her as a casualty before the monastery's defenses slay them.

An interlocutor has begun to stray from the perfection of self, focusing instead on further developing his artificial shell. Rather than testing theories on organic captives, he seeks out pieces of machinery and golem crafting materials to make his artificial body into a hybrid of machine and magical construct capable of tearing any of his rivals in twain.

Ull the Thrice Broken dwells within a city on the mortal plane, peddling his services as a surgeon. Though his work is excellent, his prices make others wary to seek him out: rather than ask for money, he instead asks for permission to remove one thing from his patient, with the stipulation that the removal will not kill them. What he chooses to take is unknown to his patients until they awake, and can range from a bone or a segment of nerve to more abstract things like their understanding of mercy or ability to sleep.

Image and stats from Paizo’s Bestiary 3.

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Ice Linnorm

Looking to mix up your dragon fights? Why not throw in a linnorm, a species of dragon based on Scandinavian lindworms.

An ice linnorm is a CR 17 dragon. Like all linnorms, it has constant freedom of movement and true seeing, as well as a death curse that activates on whoever kills it. In this case it’s a Curse of Frost (Su), inflicting a weakness to ice damage on the target. For offense it has a breath weapon of freezing slime that entangles and chills targets, congealing into ice if they don’t manage to escape one round later.

When looking at linnorms there’s two main things to take into account: 1) they’re older than dragons, and 2) they’re largely forgotten by the world at large. No dragon likes being ignored, and when that dragon is older that those upstart chromatics and metallics who go around like they own the place? Things will get messy.

Linnorms have existed for ages past, living to see the rise and fall of entire eras. The oldest have seen not only the nations of men and elves but what came before, empires built by beings from the stars and collapsed by their own disobedient servants. Such linnorms are all too happy to tell adventurers of the shapeless things lurking in those ancient ruins, hoping to lay claim to the few structures older than themselves once their current occupants are slain.

In a land of extreme temperature changes, it can be difficult to lay claim to a particular region. Ice linnorms rule the freezing nights and polar caps, but with the planet constantly rolling on multiple axes, they must frequently hibernate and cede their territories to the heat-craving salamanders, only to reclaim them in bloody attacks when the temperature falls once more. 

Political maneuvering has seen the heir apparent faced with a daunting challenge: slay the ice linnorm that preys on the northern reaches of the kingdom. Should they fail, their political adversaries will leverage that to tear down their standing, while success will subject them to the death curse and make assassination attempts much easier.

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Hound Archon

Who’s a good boy? Who's a good crusader against evil and chaos? It’s you!

A hound archon is a CR 4 outsider who serves as a scout for celestial legions. Change Shape (Su) allows them to take the form of a dog or other canine, while its spells, such as at-will detect evil and circle against evil, focus on information gathering, transport, and communication.

A hound archon is a scout, a guardian, and a captain of the armies of good. What it is not is merciful should it catch even a hint of wrongdoing. Their ability to become a canine often shows up in their roles, serving as loyal companions to heroes for years without revealing their true nature.

The urchins of Brineport don’t have a great lot in life, constantly pushed around by gangs and those who would prey on the weak. Lately they’ve found an ally in the form of a stray dog who’s scars hint at a life in pit fighting before its escape. The dog is actually a hound archon, and though he does righteous work defending the children of the street, it is a diversion from his true mission in the city. He seeks a long term solution for the urchin’s problems before he’s forced to abandon them for his mission, leaving the groups he’s been defending them from even angrier.

Stories tell of a vicious wolfman who lurks in the woods, making a lair in a region so blighted by his evil that the trees themselves produce only ash for leaves. In truth, the wolfman and the blighted land are two separate but connected issues. A fracture between worlds has allowed the essence of Abaddon to leak through into the mortal world, resulting in a hound archon taking a post to prevent the fracture from growing into a full portal.

A mistranslated symbol sees a summoning go wrong, summoning a hound archon in place of a hellhound. The binging circle keeps it contained, but the other methods of control have been found useless against an empyreal rather than a fiend. For the time being it’s left trapped in a side room, but one of the summoners has hit on the idea of using it as a test subject for a new spell: a piece of spellwork meant to infest and overwrite a creature’s essence with that of a material being.

Image and stats from Pathfinder’s Bestiary, page 19.

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Dragonkin

Today’s my weekly column with OGN covering dragonkin. If you want to read about being a draconic humanoid with a lifelong partner, you can read it here or just find the stats here.

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Graveknight

Powerful undead warriors, graveknights are to martial classes what liches are to spellcasters. If that description worries you, good. If it doesn’t, you probably won’t live long enough to find out why it should.

Graveknight is, like most forms of undead, a template applied to a creature that increases the CR, in this case adding a +2. Their core ability is Rejuvenation (Su). Should a graveknight be felled without completely destroying its armor, the armor will begin to reform the undead horror within a day. Another major ability is their Ruinous Revivification (Su), which determines the type of energy used by several other abilities. Channel Destruction (Su) increases the damage of their weapon attacks and Devastating Blast (Su) unleashes a burst of magical power, both of which are altered depending on the damage type determined by the Ruinous Revivification. Undead Mastery (Su) lets them size control of other undead, while Phantom Steed (Su) lets them conjure a ghostly mount. Finally, Sacrilegious Aura (Su) creates an area in which positive energy falters and undead creatures flourish.

Graveknights are just as versatile as liches, with a focus on martial prowess rather than spellcasting. Relentless foes who can keep coming back, they can serve as dangerous recurring antagonists to players or powerful figures in the setting.

Sir Sebastian never noticed his own demise, nor his animation as a graveknight. During a long and gruesome crusade, he served as the military commander for an exacting siege, neglecting rest, food, and his own health as he desperately tried to engineer tactics and battles to see his troops to safety. At some point he died of exhaustion, rising again as a graveknight before his body even fell to the ground. His troops have noticed a change in his tactics to become more brutal, such as animating the fallen enemies as bone golems, but most chalk it up to a desire to end the crusade without suspecting what lies under their commander's helm.

The Void’s Grasp is the most feared ship in several star systems, and for good reason. Captained by an icy graveknight clad in a powered combat exoskeleton and crewed by a mix of undead minions and half-functioning robots, the ship screams through space to prey on cargo vessels. With an unliving crew, its commander did away with a pressurized atmosphere, radiation shielding, temperature regulation, and many vital life support systems to make room for more weapons, shields, and equipment to lay waste to their foes. 

The Knight of the Sable Hills swore undying loyalty to her king, but none suspected how true the oath would be. Slain by a dragon’s lightning breath, the knight rose again to slay her killer before returning home. Despite her desire to hold to her oath, undeath has warped her mind and she now carries out her own missions backed by skeletal soldiers in pursuit of what she thinks her liege desires, even if he won’t say it.

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Gold Dragon

Gold dragons are the most powerful metallic dragons and the paragons of dragonkind… at least to their metallic bretheren. To chromatics they’re bitter enemies, and their relations with other true dragon families is largely unknown.

Gold dragons grow from wyrmlings to great wyrms, gaining additional powers as they age. They begin with two breath weapons, one of fire and the other of Weakening Breath (Su). At Very Young they gain Change Shape (Su), an at-will polymorph effect to let them impersonate humanoid creatures. At Young they gain Detect Gems (Sp), which lets them automatically detect valuable gems three times a day, and Fast Flight (Sp), a boost in flight speed that scales as they grow. At Adult they get Frightful Presence  (Ex) to cow lesser foes and Luck (Sp), which lets them attach a magical bonus to saves to any gemstone they touch. At Old they get Fire Aura (Su), which deals fire damage to anything within range unless they suppress it. Finally, they get Divine Aid (Sp) at Great Wyrm, which functions as miracle once a week.

Gold dragons tend to be the biggest good guys of a setting short of gods and empyreal lords, providing aid and wisdom to entire nations. As such, they have a bitter feud with the destructive chromatic dragons, as well as a rivalry with sovereign dragons. When it comes to outer and planar dragons, despite their power they seem more like kings of a hill rather than true emperors, and with esoteric dragons... who knows. These dynamics can easily be shuffled up or altered to give your setting some flavor, playing up the law-chaos alignment rather than the good-evil, with metallic dragons as authoritarian rulers and chromatics as freedom-seeking rebels.

Rhylaxus has spent the better part of a millennium building up a nation, establishing magical systems for crop production and armies of golems to serve in the military rather than living citizens. Unbeknown to all, including himself, the gold dragon is compromised. For the past few decades, he’s slowly fallen under the thrall of the Wormmouth, a servant of That Which Gnaws at The Gods. This abomination has lurked invisibly, wearing down his mind with telepathic probes and repeated enchantments to slowly but surely warp his mind. Should it give the order to its unknowing thrall, crops will wither to dust as golems turn on the citizens, razing an entire country from the inside out as an offering to its dark master.

A gold dragon guards her hoard with unusual ferocity even by dragons standards. Her lair is filled with traps of every size and lethality, as well as several massive golden golems in her own image. The truth behind her actions is that she is not a vaultkeeper, but a prison warden. Her hoard is composed of treasures looted from the lower planes, sentient weapons, evil artefacts, and phylacteries of liches, any one of which could wreak havoc if let loose into the world.

A red dragon has dogged his gold rival for centuries, burning cities and poisoning lakes just to inflict emotional wounds by the death toll their feud has caused. The gold’s attempts to reason with, and eventually to kill, the red have thus far been met with failure at every turn. Desperate to stop further loss of life, he has begun contemplating diabolic assistance, reasoning his own soul a small price to pay in exchange for so many others.

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Goblin

♪ Goblins chew and goblins bite/Goblins cut and goblins fight!/Burn the skin and mash the head/Goblins here and you be dead!/Bones be cracked, flesh be stewed/We be goblins! You be food! ♪

Goblins are a playable race, and as such have a negligible CR on their own, as they’re meant to be given class levels or templates to b used as enemies. The bonus they offer to players is a decent bonus to Sneak and Ride checks, a higher move speed than most small races, and the classic darkvision every non-human gets. For their stats, they  get a lagre bonus to Dexterity but penalties to both Strength and Charisma.

If goblins aren’t Pathfinder’s most iconic monster, they’re pretty close to it. When Pathfinder was just starting off with the Rise of the Runelord adventure path, the very first issue contained a gazetteer talking about their goblins and establishing what they’re like. It was the first step in establishing the Golarion setting and helped Paizo gain a reputation for interesting twists and an in-depth world. Since then they’ve shown up in several varieties nearly everywhere and with Pathfinder 2.0 they’re becoming one of the main races. The little guys may not be physically big, but they’re certainly big in popularity.

On Golarion, goblins love fire, hate dogs and horses, sing twisted ditties, think writing steals words out of your head forever, and are generally both cruel enough to cut you up for funsies and stupid enough to hide in an oven. On Middle Earth, goblins are inventors of machines and weapons meant to spread ruin and death, fear the sun, dwell in subterranean cities, and frequently sport mutations and deformities. In Warhammer, goblins are smaller relatives of orcs, viciously cruel when they think they can be but whimpering bootlickers in the presence of those stronger than them, and make up for their weakness with magical power. In short, there’s a lot of ways goblins can be portrayed and you can draw from any of them or create your own.

Goblins are valued as mechanics aboard spaceships. Their wiry frames allow them to slip into small spaces that would otherwise require renting a maintenance drone or completely dismantling the ship, while their surprising cunning makes them excellent at improvising repairs and improvements. These same qualities also make them highly desired as saboteurs, and it’s not uncommon to hear scuffling in the walls as opposing groups of goblins run across each other.

According to folklore, goblins are incomplete beings. Supposedly humans cut away all the base needs and imperfections from themselves to become the first elves, while the cast off flaws became the first goblins. Few put stock in this myth, largely because they find it reeks of elvish self-importance, but goblins hate it more than most. Spiteful over the idea that they’re merely the mistakes of a “better” race they take whatever opportunities they can to get back at elves, singling them out in fights and taking special glee in tormenting them.

Goblins are not technically a race unto themselves but a phenomenon. Some orcs who rebel against the domineering and combat centered culture of their society in the Southern Steppes will seek out an old ritual, changing their form into a smaller, weaker creature. The transformation carries with it the cunning necessary to evade their former kin, as well as greater magical potential. Other orcs despise this, seeking to crush their runtish blood traitors but remain unable to locate their hidden villages. The problem is growing, as goblins have found that they can breed true, marking the potential for a paradigm shift within a few generations as their numbers no longer depend on orcish conversions.

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Ghoul

Ghouls are the original hungry dead, although the undead aspect is absent as often as not in many depictions. First appearing in Arabian mythology as flesh eating spirits that dwell in graveyards, Lovecraft brought them modern popularity with Pickman’s Model, where they were picked up by D&D in 1970.

Ghouls are rather simple as undead go. Their bite carries Ghoul Fever (Su), a disease that drains Constitution and Dexterity until it kills the victim and reanimates them as a ghoul. On top of that, both their bite and claw attacks come with a paralysis affect, with the loophole that elves are immune.

Ghouls are peculiar creatures, sentient but slaves to an all-consuming hunger. They prefer rotting flesh and will bury victims to ferment like fine wine, but warm meat will do in a pinch. This sets the stage for a peculiar society, one revolving around consumption in much the same way as a vampire’s court.

Another interesting idea is the fact that their paralysis doesn’t affect elves. Within the Pathfinder setting the true cause of this phenomenon is unknown to all but a certain few: Kabriri, He Who Gnaws, demon lord of graves and the first ghoul to disgrace the mortal plane, was himself an elf. In his final good act before embracing his new form, his regret allowed him to place a restriction to protect his people from the predations of his spawn. In your game you can replace this with any number of causes or even shift the immunity to a different species of group. This little bit of folklore and uncertainty to their legend does wonders for making them distinctive and can help make them even more memorable.

A group of adventurers takes shelter in an abandoned church for the night, but something is off. The statue of the goddess is mangled to remove her face and hands, the rotting pews have been broken and piled up, and the soil of the graves in the graveyard has been churned up. If investigated, the adventurers will find no bodies in the graves and holes beneath the piles of pews leading to the catacombs of the church. The culprits are ghouls, who ate through the graveyard’s stock of corpses and will crawl up through the floors to attack sleeping victims.

A court of vampires invites a ghoul lord to their banquet. The blood-drinkers look down on their guest as aristocrats would a commoner that scraped their way up to a minor title, and their invitation is little more than an opportunity to mock the would-be undead noble. Their arrogance may soon prove to be their undoing as the ghoul is actually far stronger than any of them and has smuggled his pack in with the food. Should his coup succeed, the city will face a tyrannical rule as he overturns the delicate balance the vampires have kept in place out of spite and sheer ravenous hunger.

The Creaking Woods are a haunted place, almost constantly dusted with snow and with a reputation for killing visitors and explorers. The culprits of the murders are a family of ghouls who will capture people and force them to take part in macabre rituals to be inducted into their ranks before infecting or devouring them as their whims dictate. All of this is done in service and in worship to something they call Mordeao, a master they hope to call back to them with their devoted service. Whether the creature even exists at all is anyone’s guess, but they continue to carry out their rites below the watchful eyes of an effigy of branches and bone in the form of a thin humanoid creature with branching antlers.

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Starfinder Dragons

Today’s my weekly article with OGN, and I’m covering how to use dragons in a sci-fi setting. To read all about it, it can be found here.

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Ghost

Thought you killed that enemy? Wrong! Now they’re a ghost, here to make your life miserable for as long as they un-live.

Ghost is a template that adds +2 CR to any corporeal creature. They gain the Incorporeal (Ex) ability, which allows them to move through solid objects and ignore non-magical attacks, as well as Rejuvenation (Su), which prevents them from staying destroyed unless particular conditions are met. Ghosts also gain an extra ability for every 3 CR they have, chosen from a list including Corrupting Gaze (Su), Draining Touch (Su), Frightful Moan (Su), and Telekinesis (Su).

Ghosts are infamous, no two ways about it. Nearly every culture has some variation on a restless spirit without a body, and the intervening centuries have only allowed their popularity to grow. Odds are you’ve heard at least a few good ghost stories you could twist for a game, but here’s some more.

A phantom bride haunts an island resort, wedding dress still dripping with blood from mortal wounds. Attempts have been made to put her to rest, but they have all failed due to a misunderstanding of her motivations. Her restlessness is not because she was murdered, but because she had planned to kill her husband and now remains consumed by rage that he yet lives.

A necromancer managed to persist after death as a ghost. His magical talents didn’t wane with his passage and he continues his work to the best of his ability. Finding that his new form lacked raw strength he turned to the nearest resources: his own corpse. Animating and augmenting it to serve as his right hand brute, the sight of a ghost berating his own dimwitted body has become a common sight to the other members of his enclave.

A vicious storm sees captain and crew drowned or slain by the breaking ship, but the slaves at the oars weren’t so lucky. They weathered the storm, but without the sails to aid them or navigation from above, their best efforts to row to shore merely led one after another to die of exhaustion. Now the ghost ship can be seen traveling the seas, its mast shattered as the inexorable oars drive it even onward. One can board the ships safely and even ride it to disembark later, but any fool who opens the hatch to the lower decks will find themselves dragged down to serve as the replacement for one of the unfortunate rowers.

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Glabrezu

Lobster claws and a scheming intellect don't typically seem to go together, but what to I know about what crabs are thinking? The glabrezu is a CR 13 demon who specializes in manipulation and trickery.

Unusually, the glabrezu has no special powers. What it does have is an arsenal of at-will and once-a-day spell-like abilities to make up for it. It gets the most mileage out of veil, allowing it to get close to targets without alerting them to its true nature. In combat it uses confusion, reverse gravity, mirror image, greater teleport, and dispel magic to shake up and outmaneuver opponents, while using its constant true seeing to keep such tricks from working on it. When it wants to bring the pain, chaos hammer, unholy blight, and a once-per-day power word stun let it smack you around itself, while using its once-per-day summon to call in backup if it’s having trouble on its own. But by far its most powerful trick is its monthly wish, a spell players won’t have access to until roughly four levels after they’re ready to fight a glabrezu.

Glabrezu are formed from the sin of treachery and treason, and boy do they carry the theme. Their cunning minds betray the stereotypes of their brutish bodies, and their true seeing lets the liar see through lies itself. But their key feature is, again, that wish. The glabrezu gets a ninth level spell when players are just getting their first sixth level spell, but it comes with a catch: the glabrezu can only grant the wishes of others. While that may seem like a drawback at first, take a moment and think of a wish you’d like to make. Now imagine the worst possible way to interpret that wish. That’s what the glabrezu does, over and over, for their eternal lifespan to screw over as many mortals as possible.

A glabrezu was bound to a fortress as a security measure for the deepest levels. Though rather irate with these circumstances, she’s managed to make the best of the situation. Intruders who reach her chamber are allowed to pass through freely on one condition: they must make a wish.

A glabrezu has set himself up on the material plane as an information broker, utilizing his intelligence and network of demonic allies to amass information to dwarf any of his rivals. Information is distributed very deliberately, often worded in such a way to lead to further sin. For those who aren’t satisfied with simple information, or deliberately manipulated into desperation by the demon, it holds a bidding war every month for its wish.

A mysterious stranger appears to a king in his court, offering to grant him one wish in exchange for ownership of a specific mansion in the city. The king agreed, wishing for as much gold as his coffers could hold. His wish was granted, but the gold was not conjured but rather teleported from dragons’ hordes and devils’ vaults, each of whom had the means to track their missing wealth and come after it. Now the city is under siege from fiends and dragons alike, but the chaos is merely a diversion for the glabrezu to complete the final step of a plan begun centuries ago with the mansion’s first owner.

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Ghaele

Steadfast defenders of good and freedom, but bad at choosing armor that covers the vital organs, it’s the ghaele azata! A CR 13 empyreal, these beings stand up for the freedom to do what you want.

Ghaeles emphasize the whole light=good concept, with the ability to turn into a being of pure light with Light Form (Su) as well as offensive light beams and various cleric spells. They also have Gaze (Su), which lets them outright kill weaker evil creatures with but a glance.

Ghales are the knights of Elysium, warriors with potent light and healing powers as well as an offensive arsenal. However, their chaotic nature must not be discounted, as they may ignore mortal rule systems altogether in pursuit of freedom.

A ghaele seeks to free those who have had their freedom revoked, so long as it finds them virtuous. Unfortunately, its target is a prison and the wardens don’t accept the judgement of an azata to be enough evidence to simply release their prisoners.

On some worlds, the light of the sun is less a warm shimmer that brings growth and more of a scorching, blistering source of radiation that scours the surface bare. To these cave-dwelling natives, the ghaele’s light-based powers make it a terrifying creature regardless of its motives. Many have taken to offering it sacrifices, but while the azata refuses them and attempts to dissuade these misguided few, the darkness loving fiends of this world are all to willing to accept the blood in the empyreal’s stead.

A summoner sought to call upon a spirit of law and good to help aid the city guard, but a mistake in the spell called a ghaele instead. Now forced to uphold laws and bound by the strictures of the summoning, the freedom-loving azata is withering under this yoke. Yearning to escape, he’s begun searching for loopholes in commands or opportunities in missions to engineer the death of the summoner, an act which may begin its fall from empyreal to fiend.

Stats and image from Paizo’s Bestiary.

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Gelatinous Cube

Giant. Slimy. Geometric. Those are just a few of the worlds that can be used to describe the gelatinous cube. Transparent. There, that’s all of them.

A gelatinous cube is a CR 3 ooze with an iconic trick. Transparent (Ex) requires others to make perception checks just to notice it’s there, while Engulf (Ex) allows it to simply move over an opponent to engulf them in its mass. Together, these allow it to ensnare opponents who may not even realize it’s there. Once engulfed, victims are exposed both the acid damage and the Paralysis (Ex) effects found in its slam attacks without the ability to save against them. Its final ability, Acid (Ex), prevents its acid from damaging metal or stone, allowing adventurers to loot the items of its past victims.

A lot of monsters rely on stealth to get the drop on players, often by pretending to be something they’re not. The gelatinous cube just happens to take it a step further by pretending to be an empty space. Its oddly geometric form also indicates a deliberate design, something that can be exploited for a quick and easy plot hook.

The Silver Spire is a derelict tower once belonging to an alchemists’  cabal that destroyed itself in an experiment gone wrong. Though supposedly full of precious metals, as well as the secrets to make them from ordinary lead, it has remained untouched for years, in large part due to the legend of the tower’s guardian. Supposedly a floating figure in full plate, rumors says its very presence paralyzes intruders with fear and strips the flesh from their bones. The “phantom” is actually a gelatinous cube once used as a waste disposal, with the old armor of one of its first victims suspended within.

A demon lord has trapped several adventuring parties in a complex dungeon system stocked with traps and monsters. To progress through the catacombs one must collect keys to unlock the next level, with the complication that each key is suspended within a gelatinous cube. Each key grants passage to a single person and can only be used once. As if things weren’t interesting enough, the number of keys in each level is one less than the number of people within it, forcing the prisoners to chose who gets left behind.

A wealthy giant is opening trade negotiation with a nearby hamlet and adventurers have been dispatched to open the dialogue. The giant is unimpressed with such small envoys, but offers them a chance to prove themselves: they must simply pass through a maze whose walls are made of transparent gelatinous cubes. Unbeknownst to them, the giant is stacking things against them by having the cubes shift positions every few minutes to shuffle the maze’s layout.

Image and stats from Paizo’s Bestiary.

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Draelik

Today is my weekly column with OGN, and I’m covering the draeliks. They’re a playable reptilian race with some necromantic powers and a nihilistic culture, plus some sweet magic tattoos. If you want the stats without the analysis, you can find those here.

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Fungus Leshy

Leshys are minor spirits bound into bodies of flora to serve as guardians of nature or servants to fey beings. Fungus leshys are but one type of these creatures CR 2 enemies who preside over decay and renewal.

Defensively, a fungus leshy has Spores (Ex), which creates a cloud of toxic spores around it everytime it takes damage. These spores do no damage but reduce the vision of those afflicted Offensively, Puffball (Ex) lets the fungus leshy hurl a spore pod that deals minor damage while exposing the target to the same spores as its spore cloud.

Fungus is, first and foremost, a symbol of rot. For it to grow something must first die, and that’s something to keep in mind with these stubby little monsters. Whether they grow from the corpse of a god or an old plate of bread, they ahev to come from somewhere.

The Veredian Forest was once a place of beauty, but it has since been corrupted by the passage of The God That Crawls. Though the path it travelled is now nothing more than a streak of decay, the surrounding forest did not die completely but was warped beyond recognition. Trees are replaced with fleshy spires and calcified spines, twisted insects the size of men swarm overhead, and living fungi creep through the shadows.

Healing potions are in great demand during times of crisis, and the ingredients needed to make them are highly prized. One of the key ingredients is a particular strand of fungus renowned for its size and ability to recover from damage. Harvesting them is a more dangerous task  that would be expected, as they are nearly identical to the fungus leshys that sit stock still in wait to attack intruders on their moldering glens.

A druid is a master of chemistry and potions, selling his wares with the proclamation that nature was left unharmed by their production. This is true, as most of his creations are derived from various breeds of fungus leshys made from the naturally occurring mushrooms he would otherwise have to harvest.